Shine On You Crazy Diamond
by Draenog Glas
Summary: Come on you target, for far away laughter, come on you stranger, you legend you martyr, and shine.
1. Chapter 1

The sun brimmed hotly in the sky, and the rehab center seemed to melt in his vision. Yes, this was the one. The one where he would stop using his ketamine, the treatment that his parents thought would damage his brain. Depression was a bitch. But ketamine made things clearer, fuller, no longer gray and black.

Ravens wheeled the sky. They plucked worms from their beaks, they ate from the leftover cans of pop and food that were left, abandoned by the other teenagers that occupied this lone building in the middle of Montana. The mountains were claimed it would sober people up. The horseback riding would make people realize their drug use was simply escaping from a problem and only making yourself be dug into a deeper hole. No one welcomed him here. It was hot, and no one came.

The police officer opened the door for him. There was a clerk smiling wanly like a crescent moon, but she didn't really thought that this particular patient couldn't stand smiles. The walls were painted a deep, gashing red. Her smile bled in his vision. It was the one thing he couldn't take his eyes off.

"Welcome to Recovery Hills," she said, devoid of emotion. It all seemed as if his cause was hopeless, that his suggestion of coming to a place like this rather than stay in a hospital for suicide attempts was all fruitless and pointless. The woman took his suitcases, her grip shaking as if they were made of lead. He didn't see the other patients, possibly depressed teens who were drowning themselves in alcohol or using cocaine to escape. They told him it was full of other teens like him. Hopeless teens. Teens who prayed to a God and never got an answer. Teens who thought nothing was going to get better. In a way it was just like another mental hospital he visited nearly all his life. In a way, it wasn't.

"Sonic."

He looked at her, her lips waxy and fake in the light. Her nails looked to be the same material. Her eyes, too, were waxy, like candles, her irises the blue flames that ignited in the voluminous room.

"So you were just transferred from Montana State Psychiatric Hospital?"

A state psychiatric hospital. How humorous. He was basically considered a lunatic because he considered his life worthless and viable to be thrown away by his own hands.

His wrists, marked with brown, ugly scars, itched.

"Yeah, that's right." His voice was strangled, as if he was one of the schizophrenics in the hospital that could barely say a single sentence without feeling suffocated.

"What made you want to come in here today?"

Her voice sounded saccharine sweet, but he knew that sweetness wouldn't help him. If anything, it made him want to go outside and find his father's pistol and color the walls an even deeper shade of red.

The truth was that he wanted to escape the state hospital. It was too cold, too lonely, and after claiming he abused ketamine and marijuana (that he only smoked occasionally), he urged them to send him to a nice facility where he could get some mountain air and readjust his mind off the drugs. When the drugs were the only thing that kept him alive. They made him feel alive and not see anything in a vivid shade of blue, nearly black and ugly like a bruise. His parents were rich. They could afford facilities like this with no problem, and they were willing to try to help their son with anything. They even paid the state hospital in cash, even if Sonic wasn't happy there, with the other men who were child molesters and rapists and schizophrenics who talked to themselves and pissed the bed and threatened to set fire to the place.

They claimed it would help him. Sonic had stayed there for two years before he decided he needed to be somewhere nicer.

His parents ordered many things off Ikea catalogs. They went shopping at Pier One Imports daily, giving their rooms a nice sea green color, blue and green with many mechanical fish floating on the walls, while their son slept in a room that was completely bare, filled only with a few books and a little cup that reminded him to take his pills. He tried Prozac. He tried Effexor, Zoloft, Cymbalta, he tried nearly every antidepressant currently used for depression. They even had him on tricyclic antidepressants, with no effect. The father and mother, despite their love for their boy, often referred to him as a kind of phantom in the room. He just got up in the morning, ate breakfast, took his pills, then went back to bed. Then in the afternoon he would get up, read the newspaper, maybe a book, then get back to bed. At night, dinner, then maybe some night reading about people more depressed than him. Then back to bed. And the cycle continued. And when his parents offered him to stay over at his friend's from school, he would reply, "I have no friends", or if they offered him to go out on a trip he would say, "I don't want to go anywhere that has to involve you two". Mechanically. He was a machine that even one day no longer wanted to walk and only get on a conveyor belt just to get from place to place. Sometimes he even believed he was a machine and he couldn't feel human and animal happiness. He never said this to anyone in the hospital, however. He believed if he did, he would be put in the Disturbed ward and given heavy medicine to deal with his hallucinations and delusions. He often saw shades of gray and black in people's faces, in the blue leaves that serrated across the morning sky, in the building that was colored a harsh yellow against the blurry red sun, glowing as if he found Christ's promised land. The place he would go to escape everything. Even if the ketamine was the only thing that made him somewhat not suicidal. The pot made him mellow, but he had no desire to smoke it. He hadn't smoked it in the years following the state psychiatric hospitalization.

They allowed cigarettes at least. It cuts an edge to his dismal mood. Whenever God felt like he needed a break.

"I'll show you to your room, Mr. Sonic. And then you can meet the other patients."

She covered her mouth, as if she was a child who said a "naughty" word. "I can't call them patients here, Sonic. The truth is, they can put that label on themselves. But if they don't think they're sick with a drug problem, then they aren't. They may have a physical anomaly that makes them that way. They consider that their hearts don't work right. That they were born with a tumor in their head and it was removed too late. They're in here, if they would like to be considered that way, with physical deformities. Drugs aren't the sole reason they're here. They consider themselves defected. Like broken toys that God no longer wants to play with."

It was strange, really, how she worded everything. That these drug addicts were defective and shattered and smashed apart. People didn't put the label of an "addict" on them. They just considered them as normal patients in a regular everyday hospital. The walls emanated warmness towards him, as the lights glowed a hue of honeyed yellow. He felt comfortable here. He had trouble sleeping for the past month or so, and he knew he would have no trouble sleeping here.

He could hear shouting in the thick vacuous distance of the rehab facility. Glass doors that didn't seem reinforced or locked opened the way for him and his guide. It was a nice change from the psychiatric hospital. The doors would always click and be locked once they were shut behind the staff. He couldn't run anywhere, and they considered a stay of at least six months was needed before an appeal of escaping from the virtual hellhole would be realized. Two years was too much of a long time he wasted being there for depression.

The clients were all either looking at a picture, or watching TV. The TV was a large flat screen, and they were watching soccer. The picture he wasn't exactly sure. It seemed like photos of someone's family, or a particular art piece, but when the rehab center was quiet with only yellowed wandering eyes gazing at the soccer players and the waxy ears hearing the announcer's foreign accent, they began calamitously shouting at the blue and yellow picture, saying that this was where Van Gogh shot himself. This was where he died.

His room was completely white, immaculate, and bare like his room. There was a lone trash can, a small bookshelf to store his books he could buy in the bookshop down the lane from the rehab facility, a bathroom with a toilet connected to many silver pipes hanging on the wall, and a shower that streamed from the ceiling, with a small cake of soap and some generic hospital-brand shampoo and conditioner. The bathroom was also white, pure, as if he would be cleaned and his sins would be washed away in the shower.

The rooms were disappointing, he felt. There was a white dresser along with a small desk that they said he could request a typewriter in case he wanted to write his feelings on a journal or write poetry or whatever mostly alcoholic writers did, but none of the clients here were gifted verbally or, honestly she said, anywhere else. They were just teens like him.

Terribly average, with a wealthy, well-to-do family, and terribly depressed.

They considered their hearts didn't tinker right. Their machine parts weren't covered in the warranty, so they were shipped back here. They had missing parts, particularly their tin brain.

His own kind. Here, at last.

He was patted down to make sure he had no weapons, no drugs brought in. There were none, and she was glad.

His only possessions were a couple of books he borrowed from the state psychiatric library (never returned), a plastic, gnarled toothbrush, half-full toothpaste, three black shirts, two black pants, a hairbrush with half of its bristles plucked out, a pack of cigarettes, and a lighter with only a quarter of fluid left. They told him he was only allowed to have his lighter during cigarette breaks. He said he didn't mind, and they confiscated it with no issues and protests.

His books were from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Haruki Murakami, and Catcher in the Rye. He considered Catcher as his Bible, that Salinger knew what it was like being him. Being this defective machine.

She gave him his materials back, and he said thank you and tried to usher a smile. He failed, like this machine was always wonted to do.

He went back to the day room, where they continued to shout over the Van Gogh piece.

"Here! Here, you see that? This is where Van Gogh went and shot himself! This is where he died! The poor son-of-a-bitch."

"He was a rich son-of-a-bitch when he died, that's for sure. Goes to show that America only appreciates you when you're fucking dead."

"Why did this stupid bastard paint sunflowers all the time? Sunflowers are fucking gay, dude."

They were all juvenile delinquents, their vocabulary only consisting of vulgar words and the phrases "that's so gay" and "faggot", that Sonic thought he would hate being gay in a place like this.

One of the teenagers was a red echidna with dreadlocks, knuckles that protruded and nearly stabbed anyone with eyesight. He could tell, from just looking at him, that he once came from the Bronx and was abandoned by his parents and partook in a life of crime and drugs before the police caught him and told him to either go to a nice facility like this, or be sent to prison, tried as an adult.

The other, a black and red hedgehog, mostly sat silently, waiting for them to stop gawking over the photo book of Van Gogh's paintings. It was his book. He thought of Van Gogh as one of his mentors in life. But they kept debating his history, even if the "poor fucking son-of-a-bitch" had autism.

"Nah, he was schizophrenic, dude. Like the rest of these artists who claim they're so fucking loony. Van Gogh saw things. The Starry Night was nothing but a hallucination. He saw those whirls in the sky, those glowing yellow stars, and he said, 'You know what? I'm going to draw me a bitchin' picture.' But even if it was one of the greatest pictures of all time, they never bought it until he shot himself. The only way you can tell people you're worth something is after you're dead and turns out you're an alcoholic or you're crazy. That's all people care about."

The echidna kept rambling about the picture, saying that truly, when you died, your value was more. Not when you were alive. And that was why he once was in a hospital after he tried to attempt suicide. After he got out, the doctors didn't give a damn about him.

"They just filled my little hobo cup full of Prozac and they said Sayonara kid, watch out for suicidal impulses and the fact that you want to cut yourself every two hours. Take a Xanax for that. Call the doctor if he's not on vacation. Moron."

The others peeped at the new patient, their prying eyes opening him up, revealing to them all his secrets. Sonic's hands were bruised, bloody underneath the gloves, and his scars itched again. He made sure not to make his wrist bleed.

"What're ya in 'ere for?" the weasel with one long, sleek fang inching across his face had asked.

Was this weasel depressed? Probably just went here to avoid jail time. He probably committed petty crimes just to get his heroin and not caring at all if he stole from his grandmother's Precious Moments figurines just to grab a few bucks to hook a needle into his arm intravenously as if he was sick and dying from cancer.

He said he was dying from cancer, and it was why he was here.

"I needed the drug, I needed the pot to get away from my pain. Chemo never 'eemed to melt the hair off my hide though. Only women 'perienced dat."

His wrists itched. He rubbed them against the tips of the table.

A red armadillo didn't have to relay his story, to know that he was a drunk who always drank his father's wine since he was five years old, his tongue not even primed enough to enjoy the taste of wine. His mother and father never seemed to care much for him. They let him drink, however much he wanted, always bought alcohol for themselves that he could steal without a word, and they never said anything about it until it started to inconvenience them. Namely, that the beer cans were dirtying up his room and his father was sick of having to buy alcohol every other day.

"They never cared. They just wanted to get drunk too. So I'm stuck here. I can leave whenever I want, but I'd rather be here than be with my parents. I can stay here for the rest of my life for all I care."

There was a woman in the group, wearing a hoodie that Sonic could barely catch a glimpse of her golden eyes. Her drug of choice, he could tell, was Xanax. And she always got it easily.

"I just come in, talk about how nervous I feel when talking about my family, they give me a good four week supply, and I down about twenty pills a day. I have to get a higher dose every day, because you get used to it, and you have to try to get higher every time. Which is why I also smoke crack sometimes, maybe drink a little vodka. Got stuck here because I ran away from home and the police found me and my parents told me to either go here or go to jail for drug possession. And what do you know?"

"As the Cheshire Cat would say, 'We're all addicts here'."

What the black and red hedgehog was addicted to, he couldn't tell. Maybe benzo's. It was all he could tell from his ability to read thoughts and the faces that glanced at him, disgruntled and in pain over being locked up in a red and gold cage for trying to escape from this reality.

"Party drugs," he said simply. It was all he could tell them. He didn't want them to go further, deeper into his life. Even if they were his people, he couldn't tell them about the inpatient stay at Montana State Psychiatric Hospital for two years. For depression.

"Party drugs? That's baby shit!" the woman said.

"People just take those for like weeks before they get to harder drugs, like heroin, crack, or meth. Be glad you're not taking that shit, because they'll tell you over and over it'll fuck you up."

He left it at that.

The lights oozed in his vision, when they left to go to the all-white cafeteria for their breakfast. The morning broke through the black veil of the night, the stars fading away like old scars, and the sun clamored over the Montana hills to be recognized, to be seen by billions of people all over the world.

The albicant part of the eggs tasted like clouds, the yolk tasted like the sun, and the rough steak tasted like the dirt they were all standing in.

The dirt that he would be a part of, very soon.

"What are those scars on your wrists for? Did you get into a fight with someone?"

A very oblivious, naive inmate had asked him this, and he briefly shut his eyes as he chewed his food, the steak chewy and not at all tender, burnt and nearly raw, and he soon glanced at the wrists again, which throbbed and itched as he rubbed them against the tips of the table.

"Yes."


	2. Chapter 2

I came into this rehab-institution-clinic, looking for a cure. A cure for the depression that I began to delude myself that I never had.

I was a faltering machine, my heart was broken and chipped like china, and I felt so quiet, so forlorn, as if I was just born here. This was my new home. My shelter away from the abusive owners that cursed at me and hit me with their palms made of knives.

It wasn't the physical pain that hurt me. But rather, it was the emotional. Of how so many people ended up looking at me with disdain. A misfit in their glass oiled eyes. The glass instruments they used to see the delusional reality of this world.

When I first arrived, my skin was cold. Hills grew on my flesh. They kept it cold, I knew. They kept it cold, so we needed to crave a cigarette.

There was a lot of talking about philosophies. From such mad artists like Lord Byron, Anne Sexton, Kurt Cobain, Vincent Van Gogh…I never admired them. There was nothing to be admired about taking your own life. Yet I felt the same. They had created beautiful art for the oiled glass drums to look at. I had done nothing. Only sorrow emanated from me. Mom could easily afford my hospital bills from two years ago. They could buy so many things from stores and from the IKEA catalogue, because they believed they needed so many beautiful things in their life. Their son wasn't enough. Their son wasn't beautiful. Only a hindrance and a mistake.

I wrote poems sometimes.

It was hard to see in one section of the facility. They turned the lights low when it was about our bedtime. I can see reclamations and screams and blood, glowing like stars on the glacial walls. I wondered what was in there, what made these people into ghosts and history and failed attempts at prying them away from the demons that soon devoured them from the inside out.

I wasn't addicted to anything. I smoked some weed once in a while, but who doesn't in this day and age? The drug that got me sent here was ketamine. The drug that helped me, yet doctors said I was becoming too dependent on it.

The drug was eating me, they said. It ate steel and the rotten tinge that collected on my sprockets. And so, I believed them.

I was born as a machine in the beginning. My skin is corroded to the metal bones and the red and blue wires that are hidden underneath the sea of plasticine. My teeth have been always the combination of fiberglass and the remains of the bones of our ancestors who we don't mind raping their graves for their precious resources. The eyes are factory-fabricated, wires letting me see the dismal darkening of the world. I am among the few who understood the plight that we suffered. We are all broken parts. We are forgotten, and the humans have lost control over our programs. New machines are on the way, such as these Apple iPods and Macs and netbooks, that we suddenly became inferior, then discarded by the same human hands who had toiled and contracted to give birth to us.

My real mother, my real father, they had forsaken me. They forgot me as soon as technology advanced. Sentient, I believe, but they face themselves against the devices that capture their attention. Telling the world about themselves. They said they would be back for me. Sentient, advanced beings would be used sometime in the next twenty years.

Sentient, I was, yet I knew I wasn't returning. The world wasn't made for me, or for these other people who were crowding around, talking about their heroes and believing that the ultimate resurrection this world would face would come from their ultimate demise. I felt bad for them. But ultimately, as my depression program would warrant, I felt bad for myself, even more.

Over the years I have been called selfish, even by my replacement parents. They said if I ended up dying, they would become broken, like me. They wouldn't face life. No more luxuries from their shopping at Pier One Imports and their extravagant Thai cuisine that I could never stand. They come in, all dressed gaily and merrily, their kimonos colored like the dawning sun, herons swallowing their morning breakfast, the pied piper sings his jovial song to all those who wanted to face the morning. The sun was too bright for me. I couldn't even face it from the folded wings of my blinds.

Mocking a culture, I thought, but no, they were happy. They pretended to be another culture. They wore masks, they became different personalities from themselves, and they were happy. They were happy being fake. Wished that could happen to me. But my Reality and Personality program was too hard-wired and the creators often spoke of cataclysmic consequences if I became this different person. I could overheat it or slow it down with the occasional rolling of my joint and pretending that all ethereal space was being bent to my will. Listening to the older tracks, the famed things from the '60s, didn't bring me back to the days where things were alright with the one lick of the LSD sugar cubes, or the easy allotment of drugs shipped to the country. Opium, hashish, weed brought me to this world that I could accept. I became a hedgehog like I used to be, one that could go on with life, yet could realize that people cared, even the invisible spider webs that separated me from me and God. I could see the sun sparkling on his kingdom, the dew glitters, dropping down, splashing, and I knew it was raining. I couldn't go outside. Water would destroy me. I half-denied and half-accepted that water would corrode everything inside me. But as I lay in the tub, as hot as it was, as boiling as it was that my plasticine became red, I did not die. I allow the red threads to seep from me until I was nothing more, but a shallow and empty doll played to death by a psychopathic child, but I did not die.

I wished, but wishing didn't bring you anything these days. Don't listen to the hype. The media had always lied about that, especially around Christmas time.

There was nothing more to wish these days. Children and adults had gotten all they wanted. They were rich, smiling, happy, bright shining people that could face the sun as it rose from the side of the room I lived in. The flower was so strong, brilliant, old, yet there was something I thought I had to disdain from it. Night had protected me. The moon had cut through all my insecurities as I would go over to a brooding tent that sold chalices of blood oil and fairy tears and I felt somewhat like I used to be. I could laugh, for once. The muscles in my face could relax and be stretched like rubber. Rarely communicated with anyone, but anyone rarely had the desire to communicate with me. There was no reason to demand it when I wasn't even the same species as my parents, as the people that surrounded me with voices that had never once cracked, with hands that are made from the flesh and blood of those we've always known, and eyes that can be saturated with tears whenever we had faced our own inopportune tragedy.

I haven't cried in five years.

I haven't slept in two.

Give me the pills that would stop the machine from taking over my body. I was given the lovely apothecaries from the lone saint that had unintentionally murdered Romeo and Juliet. I drank these pills and elixirs until I was full. No answer was given. I was still hungry and thirsty and I had still suffered more than anyone in the world. Children are starving in Africa. I was too. I felt infinite, ubiquitous, that there was another phantom that resembled me around the world. No one just noticed these phantasms because no one had cared to look at them. Spirits roamed all over you and yet no one wanted to take the time to look at them and listen. It was possibly why they were invisible. Why they had remained dead for all those years in the first place.

God, what time is it?

I've written shit that I thought was okay and I've written shit that I thought never mattered in the first place. None of it matters.

Writing was an act that many people undermined and believed nowadays it hadn't done much for humanity as a whole. Flashing gold letters that screamed in your ears and eyes that you needed to spill all your green blood and sweat in a casino or in a piss-colored drink or God knows what else. Maybe I am truly a yuppie that preached many times to the world of how fucked up things continued to be. No one ever really cared because life was handed to us abruptly and without warning, so we had to try to enjoy everything we could. Life may be the worst gift that was ever given to me. I am not truly numb and emotionless until I was dead.

No one would ever see you anymore. No one would ever love you. Or hate you. It's nothing but bliss of indifference. That was what I wanted ever since I was about eight years old. Depression bit me and poisoned me and killed me since I was eight. None of that had ever mattered though. You hear my story, and you decide what kind of poison you would give me, those colorful elongated candy shells, and I would've wished they had chocolate inside if I still was young, but often they were bitter and had brought the misery into a further misery. Look at those people passing you by, aren't they better than you? You don't know their lives at all whatsoever, but I'm sure whatever they have is so damn perfect like watching an episode of Full House on the Hallmark channel that it made you want to puke. They show you life could be like Full House. Had anyone truly had children as cute and charming as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen? Before they burned out to obscurity like my last few cigarette?

I missed that cigarette, but a few minutes later, I get another one. I enjoy that one too, until it dies. Mourn it, then pick another one up. That was how everything was for the longest time, as I attended funerals for broken friendships that had no way of being resuscitated. I latch onto another person. I feel I might be happy with them for a while. Then they're gone. They can't stand me anymore. They claim I stress them out too much or they have better things to worry about. There was nothing more that they had to worry about than me. I was their sun. Yet I have been the night draining their color away. Was I truly terrible? Night was necessary for a few reasons I believe. The sun has to rest once in a while. People should go to bed sometime. If things were too cruel and scary and dark outside, then we didn't want to stay up to go out, so we went to our comfortable beds instead.

Fly carcasses gathered up on the shell of white paint on my dilapidated window. Does God let these flies go to heaven? Then why not me? The flies had lived through this life and had fulfilled their purpose. I thought they should just go somewhere after they die. If not, where do they go? I kept the dried up sarcophagus's because if they never had anywhere to go to in the first place, where can they return to? You go out of your parents' warm home in search of some sort of paradise beyond the glimmering stars strung up on wooden poles and giving life to machines that had no other consciousness other than to get people to point A to point B, and when you finally make it there, you learn that it never was there to be begin with. Imagine if Moses had told you you had to make a long trek to the Promise Land and after he does all this cool stuff with parting the ocean and all that, turns out this Promise Land never was there and he just wanted to exercise to rid yourself of your depression. Then you decide that you'd rather go back to your former carapace, and it just somehow grew a long slitherious tail and your home wasn't where you left it. Mom sometimes would take some toys I used to play with all the time when she said she was going to clean my room, then she would throw them away without even asking what I felt I should've done with it. Imagine if they did that to your home one day because God felt like you didn't pay enough attention to it.

Honestly, I always felt every time it rained was that all the birds in the world that had decided to fly that day were crying. I think these days birds have more reasons to cry. That's why it rains more than ever.

I can't explain thunder too much. Thunder was one of my favorite things as a child and I often got a lawn chair and just watched the rain drip from my roof of my home and hear the thunder cry. Lions might've always lived there, and they had white manes that dropped to the ground.

Do birds truly have any emotion?

I don't know why in almost all of my years, I had never truly started living and I instead focused on things that no longer happened or things that probably were never going to happen. I see my friends leaving me, but that was in the past and they told me I no longer had to worry about such things. Then came the belief that I would never have friends.

Remember when they told you that Vincent Van Gogh possibly ate lead paint? Not leaded, but I ate paint just to color my insides a different color. Often I believed I could make my heart the healing shade of green they often had in hospitals, and maybe I would start healing. The only colors I ever saw for most of my life were yellow and green, maybe a light shade of blue once in a while. Maybe I had the opposite version of being colorblind. The colors that were often forbidden in those with chromatic deficiencies I could see, but everything else had died and left.

I saw red for the first time. What a strange color. Violent feelings seem to rupture from me. I think about love sometimes. Flicker the lights off so the patients could fall silent and watch a movie that often had no relation to your problems whatsoever. Batman seemed to have it together in comparison to you. And his parents actually died rather than my parents just decide to live in a coffin in case I ever drown against this black ocean.

God, what happened?

I ask that question every day.

When people see a tragedy unfold when they least expect it, they run up to another person and immediately ask, even if this person they never met before in their lives or they're a complete idiot or couldn't even speak the same language or even had the capacity to hear you, they ask "What happened?" and this is usually followed by "is everyone okay? Any survivors? How much blood was shed unnecessarily because God one day was pissed off at us and thought we needed to have a little more drama?"

_**WHAT HAPPENED?**_

Something had happened, that is all I can tell you. My soul was lost somewhere in the middle of trying to become a decent person. It happens to a lot of us. But it's been many years and I never got it back, and I feel like it was utter hell just to find a thing that may had never been there in the first place, so I felt like giving up a lot. Instead, I focus on how I lost the thing than rather how I can get the thing back. I focus on the people that may have caused me to lose the thing and I focus on the things that actually weren't really good or helpful and had hurt me instead. I had therapists who referred to my coping strategies as a "toolbox" but the truth they never realized was that I probably had most of the tools I needed, but I truly didn't even know how to use any of them. They give me this thing that is supposed to help, but I feel so crushed under the weight of things I don't even realize are hurting me and my mechanical parts weren't lubricated enough to avoid these heavy things. Immobilized like a snake lying under a blanket of snow. Take it they say, take it. It will help you. But it's far away from me. Your lips move, but I can't hear what you say. The black ocean thrashed me away from you and I felt I wasn't with anyone anymore with a rational mind. Reality had succumbed to the realness of fantasy inside my brain.

When I was a child, I had a fever. My mind couldn't piece together the rationalities that my parents and friends had always known and had always lived with. They were unfamiliar. As I feared monsters hiding under my bed with red glowing eyes, when I feared I was in the throes of growing older that things would suddenly start making sense. And later, I wouldn't be sure if it really did.

What happened, God?

Children will start asking a million questions and parents would often get tired of us wondering about this world. Sometimes I viewed this a child getting ready to see things the way their parents do, when things go in order, are concrete and tangible, logical and rational. I asked questions a lot and got the right answers. Then I think later on when I got sick with that blue fever, I thought the numbers would start with 1 then 2 and 3 and 4 then I wasn't sure why but I thought 20 went after that. In a Social Studies class I thought the Indians truly didn't deserve to have their land taken away and we should've been more apologetic. They mentioned the Trail of Tears, but the teacher never thought showing some sort of History Channel video about it was necessary. I wanted to know what it was like to cry back then and to have something dear to you truly be taken away from you. I had everything, yet I felt everything in my life was vacant and no one had ever truly loved me. People do too love you they said, but I couldn't comprehend why they would. I sympathized with some people that no longer existed and I believed numbers truly didn't have to go in the right order and colors could shine on anything they wished.

It was nice to be lost in the forest, it was so quiet there, unlike the rest of my head. I wished it was still there. They took me to this Montana facility to see the forests.

Yet when I fell asleep, I expected things to be different. Like the instant I would be admitted to this facility my life would turn brighter, and things would begin to resolve and I could see through the fog that surrounded that oily sea that had plagued me for so long.

I woke up in the cold bed with thin sheets, the sun hiding beneath the forest that I had praised would help me, and when my parents were excited I would go to a high-rate facility than the state hospital I was in for two years of my life, I was reminded that I was still who I was, that I had always awoke to a morning with no reason for waking and I was afraid that brief happiness I had was dissipating and there was nothing I could do to make it stay for a little longer in the missing part of my soul.

It's not enough, I realized. It's not enough.


End file.
